I have a couple Freescale 68HCS08 MCUs connected in an I2C network, running different programs. When I click "debug," Codewarrior checks for a running instance of hiwave.exe to load and debug the program. I'd like to debug both simultaneously, which means having two instances running.
What is the best way to do this? Do I need two PC's? Is it better to try and manually reload the MCU's, using the Build command instead of Debug in Codewarrior?
I can run two instances of hiwave.exe manually, and then use the "File"->"Load Application" menu item to select the .abs file. It seems to run both instances fine, including code display and breakpoints, although I'm using full-chip simulation rather than a hardware debugger at the moment. I would guess that's where most of the fun is, in making sure that each instance uses the correct debugger, especially if you're using two of the same USB devices.
"That's too easy", I can hear you saying. Fine, take option 2:
I do all my CodeWarrior / Hiwave stuff in "Windows XP Mode", a Virtual PC running under Windows 7, mostly because CodeWarrior's installer doesn't run on 64-bit architectures (or it didn't a few months ago, for which I yelled at them in their forums).
I'm not entirely sure of the licensing technicalities (if you have Windows 7 pro, you should get at least one free license to use the Windows XP mode), but perhaps you could do something similar - e.g. run a Virtual PC environment with one of your debuggers passed through to the virtual system (Windows Virtual PC and other virtualization environments let you pass USB devices through), and have your other debugger still attached to the 'host' system. You could then have CodeWarrior/Hiwave installed on both the virtual and host systems, with one controlling system A and the other controlling system B. USB fun-time still applies, as you'd have to make sure the 'correct' USB debugger was passed through to the virtual system.
The debugger, HIWAVE.EXE will not work in either Windows XP mode, nor VMs such as VMWARE WORKSTATION, nor any of the VMs available in Linux. This is to do with the way the driver for the USB MULTILINK has been architecured.
Making Codewarrior v6.x work in Windows 7 is easy, by patching the installer.
We were not able to get the debugging pod to work to debug live hardware, because of the fact that the USB driver is implemented with Jungo Windriver, and, as per other articles, neither of the virtual machines can push that across into the virtual environment.
I have wasted months trying to solve this, in the end we resurrected old XP licenses and installed XP. However safe to say that, this, combined with Freescale's lack of vision to allow people running Linux to develop for the silicon, forced me into a decision that I will no longer use their products.
However, running multiple instances of the debugger is possible. The maximum seems to be around 20
Related
I've got an old 16-bit application, that was developed for Windows 3.1. It preforms some calculations and is part of a more complex system. The system sets up the inputs for the program, and collects the output results.
Unfortunately, the 16-bit program is here to stay for the mean time, so we have to work around the frustrations it causes on modern operating systems.
The system runs on Windows XP, and on physical Windows XP machines it runs alright. The machine I'm having a problem with, is a Windows XP instance running on VirtualBox (version 4.1.12) on a Debian box. The physical computer is an HP Proliant server, with Quad Core Xeon 3.4 Ghz. I'm using remote desktop to access the computer from my Windows 7 box.
The error I'm getting is, "PROGRAM caused a General Protection Fault in WIN87EM.DLL at address : 0001:02C9". The annoying thing is, at times it works and other times it doesn't, making troubleshooting all that more frustrating.
From trawling the internet, I've come across a few sites that mention the same problem. None of them seem to offer real solutions, except to say that WIN87EM.DLL supplies floating point routines, and has some issues with certain printers.
I've uninstalled all printers on the virtual machine, I've also tried installing a PDF writer and setting it as the default printer - so that there is a printer on the machine. I've disabled resource sharing with my Remote Desktop connection. I've updated the Virtual Machine Guest drivers on the machine. I've also tried setting the compatibility to Windows 95 in the properties of the executable.
Any pointers for troubleshooting this problem, or methods I could try to get it working?
This question is old but I had this exact win87em.dll crash with some 16-bit factory automation software running natively on windows 7. By following the method of HIDE87.com and editing autoexec.nt I was able to make the software stop crashing so that I could make edits.
This machine was running Intel 8 Series/C220 Series chips. I attribute this configuration to the crash because I have used this same 16-bit software on tons of other windows 7 machines for years now.
edit: here's the steps I used to fix the problem
Download winfloat.exe from http://www.conradshome.com/win31/archive/
Open winfloat.exe with 7zip. Find HIDE87.com and extract it to desktop.
Copy HIDE87.com to C:\Windows\System32\
Open c:\windows\system32\autoexec.nt with notepad
At top of file, after first group of comments add the following
lh %SystemRoot%\system32\HIDE87.com
Add a comment above your last line
REM Fix for Gen. Protection Fault in win87em.dll
Save changes to autoexec.nt and reboot pc.
This was the same error I had with Microsoft XP Mode.
Obviously WIN87EM.DLL has Problems with virtualized processors.
My Solution: I "unloaded" the XP-Version of WIN87EM.DLL in the registry (search and delete every item with this name), and copied a much older version into application folder. The old version can be found her: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/86869/de
Good luck!
Video Driver win87em.dll
This is the step by step resolution to the problem we had with the “win87em.dll” issue.
Left-Click the START button in the bottom left corner of the screen.
Right-Click My Computer and left click Properties.
Left-Click the tab at the top that says Hardware
Left-Click the button that says Device Manager.
Left-Click the + sign next to Display Adapters near the top of the list.
Right-Click the items shown in the expanded list under Display Adapters and left-click Disable.
Left-Click the Yes button that shows when windows asks if you are sure you want to disable it.
Left-Click the No button when windows asks if you want to reboot.
Repeat the disable process for each item listed under Display Adapters (usually only one or two)
Reboot the PC and the win87em.dll General Protection Fault errors should go away.
This is only applicable for users on Windows XP. Most likely the display adapters listed will be shown as an Intel G41 internal display adapter, but it may be another Intel device. If this does not fix the issue then it is likely a bad printer driver causing the problem.
Disabling the video adapter will not hurt windows. It will make their computer unable to watch videos or play 3D games, but windows will still run and look fine. (They will probably need to change their screen resolution after rebooting.)
VirtualBox 4.3.16 should also have a fix. See https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/12646 If you want the fix immediately, you'll have to build VirtualBox from OSE sources.
Update: VirtualBox 4.3.16 containing this fix is now officially released.
I know this is an old thread but I came across it while searching as I was having the same issue under Windows XP running VirtualBox. Eventually I found the following:
https://communities.vmware.com/people/jmattson/blog/2012/03
This is for VMWare and seems to have fixed the issue, couldn't find anything similar for VirtualBox but as VMWare Player is free it is a good workaround for anyone having this problem.
in the case of virtual machines - vxBOX (tested) of VM ware (maybe)
you just have to switch off all para virtualization options in the processors section of VX BOX options.
works like magic!
I'd like to ask anybody who has built a virtualized VS2010 environment in VirtualBox or VMware, which one was able to work out of the box without too much tweaking? Or both need workarounds to get stuff working?
Both are fine as long as you install the respective tools and drivers provided for the guest OS
If you're using VMWare Workstation, you can leverage even more out of the environment by installing Visual Studio on the Host PC, and using the Guest VM for debugging, if your application crashes you can actually rewind back to before the crash and step through your code with the same heap and stack before it crashed!
Basically, I suggest going with VMWare Workstation. It's pretty cheap (assuming you get paid to program) and has many, many awesome features that you'll come to love. If you're a hobbyist/student programmer however, you'll likely find VirtualBox to be a little more functional than the free VMWare Player.
As far as performance goes, Intel and AMD both have shipped chips with hardware virtualization since 2005/2006 respectively. This is called VT-x or AMD-V, and often has to be enabled in the bios on older machines.
Basically this means that your BIOS handles Memory and I/O virtualization on this chip, while specialist drivers (e.g. VMWare Tools) are installed to improve graphics and mouse performance - effectively this means the resulting VM has near native performance with minimal overhead.
Hope that helps!
You can work with a VS2010/Windows virtualized environment with no problems.
I've worked with such combination and I had no problems. Both VMWare and VirtualBox are stable so far since years and Windows OS virtualization works properly.
Obviously, you can have performance loss, because a virtualized OS has more bottle necked access to resources than a host one, but current CPUs from Intel and AMD have advanced virtualization instruction extensions which accelerates virtualization operations.
So... Just go ahead!
I don't know your requirement but there is also a great alternative using Win 7.
You can create a vhd file and boot on the vhd file.
A few steps more, you can create a base vhd file with everything you need, mark it as readonly and create as many differential disk as you want.
The drawback of this method are these ones :
it's a bit tricky to create the base and diff disk, because you have to do it in the setup console of windows setup (but google can help you)
there is a small performance impact on the disk I/O (but lower than the visualization environment)
you can run only one system at a time. In fact, nothing disallow you to install a virtualization software
you can't have your "host" and it's potential tools (corporate email, etc.)
but at least, the performance will be greatly better than a virtualization software.
I already have experience with setting up virtual machines, running them and other minor tasks. Im a gamer, so I wont get rid of windows (for now at least...) but I do want to be a great programmer and to be involved with the Open-Source community.
Id like to know if its a good idea to do my programming in linux through a virtual machine, vs giving it a partitioned section of the HDD. Id like to know about performance pros and cons and functionality.
All responses are appreciated, thanks in advance.
The type of programming I intend to dive into :
Android Dev, Web Dev, Desktop Dev...More Android and Web right now though.
So im looking at C#,C,C++,Java,PHP,HTML,MySQL...Off the top of the dome.
I do web designing as well, so dreamweaver is added as an "essential". But im sure I can do dreamweaver files and upload them to the server after programming in Linux...Right?
And any info on IDE's in Linux for the above mentioned are appreciated, but i would prefer going the coding route and understanding the essence of whats happening "under the covers"
Thanks to all for reading, I appreciate it.
Hope this isnt confusing :S
There is an easier solution..
I still have to use Windows for Symbian programming so I use a Wubi and Ubuntu to provide my double bout into Linux..you deploy Wubi uses a large file and thus no need to worry or mess with creating a partition..
I have used it for 18 months with no data loss and no worries..
There is also another tool called andlinux:
http://www.andlinux.org/
It uses colinux to run Linux as a program inside windows..
A couple things:
If you're using an IDE, there's no point to coding on Linux. Linux is nice for programming because the command line tools are awesome. Netbeans and Eclipse both work fine on Windows. All you'd be missing is makefiles (which IDEs don't use anyway).
Using a virtual machine would be annoying (working with the window and stuff) and slow. Try AndLinux if you want to have Linux running in Windows. It sets up X and Pulseaudio for you, so all of your programs will appear to be native. It's basically a way to run Ubuntu as a Windows service (all Ubuntu packages for your architecture are installable).
If you just want the fun of Linux command line programs without access to all of Ubuntu, cygwin is smaller and might be faster.
If by "Dreamweaver files", you mean HTML/PHP/CSS, then yes, you can just upload them to the server. As far as I know, the only ASP or ASP.net compatible server is Microsoft's, but why use that anyway?
EDIT: SO didn't give me enough space in the comments to answer your question..
AndLinux and Cygwin are basically just better ways to do your "virtual machine" idea.
Cygwin adds a posix layer to Windows (basically everything you need to compile Unix/Linux/BSD programs). This means that you can generally take a Linux program and just compile it on Windows and have it work. They also have repositories, but in my experience, the cygwin installer is slow and hard to use.
AndLinux runs the Linux kernel as a Windows service, giving you a similar experience as running it in VirtualBox/other virtualization programs. However, it also sets up X (the graphics layer for Linux) and PulseAudio (a sound system that lets you run sound over a network), so that when you run Linux programs they act and sound like native programs. I also like AndLinux better because you have access to all of Ubuntu's programs, and apt-get is easier to use than cygwin's installer. Also, if you use AndLinux and later to decide to go 100% Linux, you're basically already using it that way.
What I'm getting at is: If you want to run Linux in a virtual machine, don't. Just install AndLinux. It will be faster and it's much easier to work with (since everything is just a normal window).
Here's an example of the difference:
Screenshot of AndLinux: The program in the bottom right corner is running in AndLinux. Notice how it just looks like a badly themed Windows program? Compare that to something like this, where you have another desktop in a Window.
And still.. there's no reason to virtualize Netbeans. It's a native Windows program and you can gain nothing and lose a lot of speed.
If you're interested in Android development and you want to use Linux, then I would recommend you do your development in Eclipse. Eclipse is available for Linux and if you get Ubuntu then Eclipse is amazingly easy to install. I used VirtualBox + Ubuntu + Eclipse for several projects I worked on. If you decide that Linux is not for you and your project was in Eclipse then you will have no problem switching back to Windows since Eclipse is available for both operating systems.
The ONLY problem I had was the screen size on the virtual machine... if you have a big screen and you use a virtual machine then you might get limited to a fraction of your actual screen resolution. It's very easy to install Linux on a second partition, so I would just recommend you go with a second partition if you want to fully utilize the size of your monitor.
My setup is sort of the opposite: I run Linux as my main OS, both at work an at home, and I have Windows in a virtual machine. On a modern computer with adequate memory the performance of development tools is not a problem. I work with Visual Studio in the virtual machine, and I have seen few performance issues. (But note that this is on a fast computer, and that you may need more memory than otherwise, since you are running two OS:es at the same time. On an old computer with less memory it can become unbearable.)
Dual-boot, where you have to restart the computer to switch OS, doesn't work well for me. It takes way too much time to switch, and really need to switch back and forth. Having Windows in a window works much better for me, and you can maximize that "Windows window", so it looks like you're just running Windows.
One thing you may want to look at is to have Linux running in a VM, then configuring Samba to allow the host to network-mount pieces of the Linux filesystem so that you can operate using Windows tools, and have Linux running the server processes (e.g., httpd). Alternatively, I'm sure that there are shell extensions for using FTP, NFS, or SSH/SFTP servers from within Explorer, but I've not looked at any for a long time.
If you should happen to need to use graphical Linux tools then you can use the X server found in cygwin for that.
The downside of this plan is that Samba can be a bit tricky to configure, but you get to use the Windows tools you're already familiar with.
I had no issues running Ubuntu via VMWare. You can easily switch to full screen mode anytime. Strongly recommended. One shortcoming is that Linux will not be exposed to the full potential of your hardware. Compbiz Fusion failed to work as a result.
Given that you're a gamer, I'm thinking your machine should be fast enough to run Linux in a VM. Best to try out the VM before messing with disk partitions.
I use physically separate machines to run Linux and Windows (and MacOS X). This means that I don't have to reboot to do something different, and each system gets the full power of the hardware.
Disadvantages: more desk space used, more time and money spent maintaining hardware (though if you do a rolling upgrade, this is mitigated - Linux runs most happily on not-quite-new machines). Doesn't work so well if you like carrying laptops around.
Be aware that VMs universally don't give you full graphics acceleration. This can be a non-issue (many programs must cope with Intel GMA anyway), or it can be a showstopper. Your choice.
After having had a dev PC HD corrupt, I'm considering the idea of making my development environment be fully Virtual PC based.
The core items would be:
- XP Pro 32
- IIS
- VS2003
- VS2008
- SQL Server 2005
- Office 2003
Primary source would reside on a server in SVN with only a clocal copy on the VPC.
This would be for Windows based web and desktop development.
Assuming that the host machine has decent performance and provides for hardware virtualization, are there any known gotchas with such a setup, ie main pros and cons. Any performance issues or other issues that make this a good or bad idea?
I'd like to go this route so I can create a full backup VPC that can be put on a new PC if one fails and is repalced or copied to a laptop as needed for offsite work, etc. With the new Virtual PC features of Win7 this seems like it may be even better goign forward too.
Would like to get some feedback on this before we go down that road...
I wouldn't recommend Virtual PC because the performance is pretty disappointing compared to VMWare.
I've used a virtual development machine inside VMWare Workstation and VMWare Fusion on Mac for quite a while, and it works very well. It feels as if you're running on a dedicated machine.
My recommendations are:
Use a 64-bit OS as your host OS (Vista x64, Windows 7 64-bit, Mac OS X Leopord)
Have at least 6GB of RAM on your physical machine
Allocate 3GB of RAM to your VM for 32-bit, or more for a 64-bit guest OS
Pre-allocate the diskspace for your guest OS (no auto-grow)
Another advantage is that you can take your VM from a Windows-based VMWare Workstation to a Mac-based VMWare Fusion (and the other way around) without any problems.
I have been running multiple virtual development environments in MS Virtual PC and Virtualbox for 2 years now. I am doing mostly asp.net applications, some of the solutions are relatively large and use large databases which I also run inside the VM.
My observations based on this:
It is a good idea for exactly the reasons you mention and it works fine. Go for it!
768 megs of ram for the VM is enough, but more is better.
Have a Multi-core CPU.
Install the virtual machine additions for the guest OS. (This is basically like installing the proper drivers for your "virtual" hardware, and seems to be more important for performance than having hardware virtualisation support).
If possible, have the VM disk image on
a separate physical disk from the
host OS.
Use Virtualbox. It's free, and being developed rapidly. It might already be the best.
If you can satisfy the above, performance is no issue. Multiple Visual studio instances, IIS, SQL, Office, works just fine.
Running multiple copies of the same guest OS when it is a member of a domain/AD is tricky. If you need to do this you should read up on the sysprep.exe tool. Basically you can't just make a copy of the virtual disk, you need to take some special precautions.
Virtual PC is very convenient and it was what I used for starters, but I have to say that virtualbox seems to have overtaken it now. It was a bit rough in the beginning but the last few versions have really gotten there.
Virtualbox is fully free, and it has better features than VPC2007 - the main one that made me switch was the support for high resolutions. Virtualbox runs fullscreen on my 1920x1080 no problem.
It can also run virtual PC images, so switching was just a matter of installing virtualbox and adding my existing virtual PC disks to it.
An added benefit is that I can run the virtual images just as easily on my new mac as on the old pc.
The commercial options are not (anymore) worth what they cost, IMHO.
One thing you might have to consider is the lack of support for multiple monitors within the VM. I really like using multiple monitors, one for my source, the rest for all the rest. As far as I know, this is not possible in Virtual PC. Aside from that I can't think of anything that should hold you back, it's something I have been considering as well.
Regards,
Sebastiaan
VirtualBox from Sun is also a good choice. I am writing this from a Vista laptop with a virtualised Ubuntu dev environment.
One thing that Virtual Box is great for is having a seamless mode in which the guest OS application windows are presented as just windows on the host system, with a single common background (you get 2 status bars - one for Windows and one for Linux).
The Z-orders don't interpolate (ie all guest windows appear on the same Z plane in the host Window system, with their own Z-order within that plane) which can make it a bit odd, but you get used to it.
It is particularly useful if you need to build across many environments. VirtualBox is getting better and I now have an OpenSolaris environment and a FreeBSD one as well.
It is free as in beer which can be handy.
I actually run three development environments (and many test environments) under Ubuntu host in Windows guest virtual machines - it's very good for keeping things separated and for being able to restore test environments to a known point. It's also handy since the backup is a simple directory copy on the host and you don't have to worry about recovering settings or re-installing applications. etc.
I prefer VMWare over Virtual PC for both performance and usability (keep in mind that's my opinion). You don't need the VMWare Workstation product to create a VM - check out EasyVMX here for a way to create easy VMs.
The one thing you'll miss though is VMWare tools which only comes with the Workstation product, not the player. But VMWare has this for download here - I'm unsure of the legality of this even though it's an official download from VMWare, you may only be able to use it if you have the paid product.
I actually have a license for Workstation, it's just an earlier version and I prefer the latest Player.
Is there a debugger which works from a virtual machine's host?
That is, instead of using interrupts inside the machine, I expect this debugger to recognize the virtual machine's OS routines, memory locations etc, and to recognize when the OS is launching a certian EXE. Then I want to be able to set hardware-like breakpoints per process through the host computer. I'll clarify. The virtualized computer and OS would never know that the breakpoint was set or occurred. All debug handling would be done by the host computer which emulates a virtual computer.
This would enable much stronger breakpoint mechanism, for example "break when a certain data is read from the CDROM drive", or "break when a certain file on the disk contains the following byte sequence".
This approach will also, for example, eliminate anti-debugger techniques which are suppose to alter the executable's behavior when running under a debugger. (OTOH it opens up a new area of anti-virtualization techniques which relies upon slight differences between emulated computer and real hardware).
Is there such a product? Does it look like a good idea?
VMware has offered VM debugging plugins for Visual Studio and Eclipse for some time now. It is even possible to record a VM run (which logs input from all devices, allowing to replay the execution of the VM precisely as when it was recorded), then step through the recording with a debugger.
Recent versions of IDA Pro include a debugger interface which, among other setups, can inspect a BOCHS virtual machine.